Meditation on New Language

I need a new language to express my feelings when I read headlines like this on respected medical websites:

Surgery in Drug-Resistant Children? It's Worth It!

I imagine a group of marketers and branders, the people a medical consortium has hired to spice up language, maybe make it more upbeat or appealing in the way that television ads for drugs show people running through fields of flowers even as a litany of side effects are listed. Perhaps these people -- the ones in the rooms brainstorming, the editors of medical websites -- not the ones running through fields or having seizures or being constipated -- are the same experts who come up with pharmaceutical drug names -- Lyrica to conjure soothing musical notes instead of addiction or constant diarrhea or Banzel with its suggestion of a premier fashion house for accessories instead of an antiepileptic whose side effects include increased seizures and psychotic behavior. How about Fycompa with that tiny little nod to coma, like Fie On That Seizure-Induced Coma! Its side effects include increasing belligerent behavior and aggression, even homicidal ideation.

There's the language assigned to pharmaceutical side effects: irritability for psychotic, behavioral disturbances for head-banging or clawing one's skin to blood, increased secretions for drooling cups of liquid, and insomnia for never sleeping again.

Drug-resistant children is a phrase that implicates the child, doesn't it? It smoothes out the anxiety and insanity inherent and provoked by an inefficient treatment. It's language that covers for hideous drugs that don't work for shit to control seizures in children.

The degradation of language.

No more plums in the icebox. This is just to say.

How casual it all sounds, in this, arguably, well-intended iteration.

Brian Surgery!

It’s worth it!

There shouldn't be exclamation marks after brain surgery but rather a new sign from a new language that amplifies cutting into the brain of your child and removing a part of it, her, him, they.

Actually, I don’t need a new language to describe my feelings. You can probably surmise them. No probably. You surmise them. Your gift for recognizing irony is intact, Reader, if you’ve been coming here a while.  

We need a new language to discuss these medical things.  

We need a new language to express things like brain surgery for children — a language that could encompass possibility, gravity, and hope but also fuckery and absurdity. 

Also, specificity.

The possibility, gravity, fuckery, absurdity and hope of brain surgery.

so much depends upon a red wheel

barrow glazed with rain water beside the

white chickens

William Carlos Williams

Summer Poem

Summer Song

William Carlos Williams, 1883 - 1963

Wanderer moon
smiling a
faintly ironical smile
at this
brilliant, dew-moistened
summer morning,—
a detached
sleepily indifferent
smile, a
wanderer’s smile,—
if I should
buy a shirt
your color and
put on a necktie
sky-blue
where would they carry me?

via Poets.org

Only the imagination is real

The line Asphodel, that greeny flower came, unbidden, to my lips the other day, and this morning in the drone of construction on my street, I woke up to it.

Of asphodel, that greeny flower,
                  like a buttercup
                                    upon its branching stem -
save that it's green and wooden -
                   I come, my sweet,
                                    to sing to you.

William Carlos Williams', the great American poet, wrote that long love poem in his seventies, after a period of great suffering, and whether or not you like poetry, there's a bit in its many lines that might speak to you of love and power and imagination and poetry.

This morning, not only did I wake up to that line in my head, but later I opened some mail, one being a piece from Poetry magazine with a request to subscribe beginning with this to Dear Reader:

                                            It is difficult
            to get the news from poems
                             yet men die miserably every day
           of what is found there.

(from Asphodel, that Greeny Flower)

As a superstitious person, in love with symbol and signs, I pulled my old copy of Pictures from Brueghel and other poems by William Carlos Williams off my bookshelf. I haven't opened it, probably, in years, had forgotten that I bought it for $.50 from a used bookshop in Newport, Rhode Island during the summer of 1983 when I spent three months there, living with ten other girls in a ramshackle house.

It was the summer of The Americas Cup, the great sailing race, and we girls would hang out on the docks during the day, flirting with sailors, sometimes getting invited on board gigantic yachts. We bicycled on winding roads lined with mansions and went to rocky beaches, the water too cold and rough to swim in. We worked as waitresses and housekeepers and jewelry store salesgirls (me). Too young to serve alcohol and thus wait tables, I sat hunched, reading The Idiot on a stool in a jewelry store, on one of the piers that catered to rich tourists who rarely came inside. Despite my friends and our crowded living conditions, I remember it as a lonely summer, when I wandered into that tiny bookstore, how many hours I spent mooning in its aisles, fingering dusty little paperbacks, pining for a certain boy who had appeared then disappeared and appeared again in my life that summer.

There is no power 
                 so great as love 
                                   which is a sea, 
which is a garden -- 
                 as enduring 
                                   as the verses 
of that blind old man 
                   destined 
                                   to live forever.

There's no real point to this meandering post other than the pleasure of memory and perhaps an affirmation of the imagination. The drone of machines continues outside my door, the suffocating heat of the last few days has apparently broken, and I have double headers of baseball and lacrosse to attend. I have boys that I love playing these games, boys yet unaware of poetry, and The Idiot (except, of course, as it pertains to epilepsy) and a mother who still is that girl, an asphodel, that greeny flower.

poetry instead of Rush

Even I'm getting tired of all this brouhaha over Rush and his vile comments. There are people in my neighborhood, minor television celebrities who are getting in trouble now for nasty Tweets. He was just trying to be funny, apologists will say about Rush. She's really a nice person; it's her politics that aren't, one of my friends said about the minor celebrity. Anywho. I grabbed the February 23rd issue of The New York Review of Books and felt a frisson (how's that for pretentious) when I opened it to The New World of William Carlos Williams, a review of three new books about the great modernist American poet with a great big photo of the dear man on the first page.

I just quoted from one of Williams' poems the other day on this blog because my dog-eared copy of one of his books of poetry is one of my favorites. What synchronicity! What serendipity! What does this have to do with Rush? Well, about halfway through this five million word article, when I was well on my way to a happy oblivion, I read that Williams was notoriously insecure and perhaps even insanely jealous of his more famous poetic colleagues -- the Ezra Pounds and H.D.s, especially the T.S. Eliots. When he left his home of Rutherford, New Jersey (where he worked as a general practitioner, serving a poor and immigrant population) for a visit to Paris with his wife in 1924, he evidently felt paranoid and certain he was being scorned by the likes of Pound and H.D. And still, what does this have to do with Rush? Well, really, not much except that when commenting about his fellow poet T.S. Eliot, Williams wrote Maybe I'm wrong but I distrust that bastard more than any writer I know in the world today. He then compared Eliot's work to moles on a pig's belly instead of tits. I laughed out loud when I read that. I never really got into Eliot's poetry like I did Williams, and I thought how nice it would be if someone out in the ether could say something that perfectly cutting about a person like Rush.

So, there you go. Poetry instead of Rush.

Listen to this:

To a Poor Old Woman

and this:

The Widow's Lament in Springtime

and read this:

I

By the road to the contagious hospital
under the surge of the blue
mottled clouds driven from the
northeast-a cold wind.  Beyond, the
waste of broad, muddy fields
brown with dried weeds, standing and fallen

patches of standing water
the scattering of tall trees

All along the road the reddish
purplish, forked, upstanding, twiggy
stuff of bushes and small trees
with dead, brown leaves under them
leafless vines-

Lifeless in appearance, sluggish
dazed spring approaches-

They enter the new world naked,
cold, uncertain of all
save that they enter.  All about them
the cold, familiar wind-

Now the grass, tomorrow
the stiff curl of wildcarrot leaf
One by one objects are defined-
It quickens:  clarity, outline of leaf


But now the stark dignity of
entrance-Still, the profound change
has come upon them:  rooted, they
grip down and begin to awaken

-- from Spring and All


and think about this:

No ideas but in things --


William Carlos Williams, from Paterson